A stronger, healthier Dilly Dally reaches for Heaven on second album

The first time a band really goes for it often turns out to be the first time that a band nearly blows apart, if indeed it doesn’t blow apart completely.

Dilly Dally learned the hard way that it was no tougher than the rest while doggedly touring its 2015 debut, Sore, for as long as the offers to keep touring kept coming in — which turned out to be a fairly long time, since that scorching slab of grunge-indebted, metallo-punk sturm und drangwound up becoming one of the year’s most critically acclaimed rock albums across at least three continents. By the time the Toronto quartet got off the road more than a year later it was a force to be reckoned with onstage, but exhaustion, coexisting in a van for months on end and some addiction issues had rent the friendships at its core apart to the extent that no one was sure that there would be a Dilly Dally any longer.

It’s a familiar rock ‘n’ roll scenario, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier when you’re going through it. So frontwoman and guitarist Katie Monks was determined while writing and recording Dilly Dally’s exceptional second album, Heaven — due out Sept. 14 — to bring more levity and catharsis to the proceedings this time around. If nothing else, she figured, it might help keep the band a bit healthier.

“With this album, I just had to dig deep inside and think ‘What do I have to say to the world right now?’ ” says Monks, on the line from Minneapolis hours before the kickoff of a two-month tour with California punks Fidlar. “Especially after the Trump election and all of this stuff, it felt like everything was in such disarray around me. There was so much chaos. I guess I was overwhelmed with depression, in a way, because there was so much going on in the world that was negative. It was so hard to keep up with. It just kind of felt like ‘Ugh, what’s the point?’ Why even try fighting this little battle over here when there’s so many more things going on and so many bigger issues?”

It was, in fact, Monks’s memories of a gig in Washington, D.C. with Grouplove the day after Donald Trump’s election to president that provided a kind of philosophical framework for Heaven — which, despite being even heavier and doom-ier at points than Sore, ultimately extends a hand down through the darkness to lift the listener out of despair.

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Midway through a tour where audiences had been reliably “loud and rambunctious and in good spirits,” Dilly Dally was suddenly faced with a “sea of people at this large venue and they were all silent.” And the room stayed silent until, in the middle of a painfully long tuning break, a geeky kid near the front finally yelled “America sucks!” at the top of his lungs. Monks leaned into the microphone, responded with a simple “Yeah” and a roar went up. The gig was saved.

“I really didn’t know what to say because I was feeling this wave of depression that washed over the whole country,” she recalls. “But I realized they just wanted someone to acknowledge how they were feeling.

“I think that’s what this album attempts to do, is to meet the listener who might potentially be suffering from depression where they’re at and to acknowledge those feelings, that sadness, that darknessThat’s where some of the slight doom-metal references come into the music, the heaviness. And then once you meet them where they’re at, then you provide them tools.”

Heaven is an work of strength and resilience and self-empowerment, then, not of wallowing. And Monks wanted it that way for the sake of herself and the rest of Dilly Dally — guitar heroine Liz Ball, bassist Jimmy Tony and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz — as well as anyone else there who might identify with and take succour from the sentiments expressed in the music. It’s no accident that the first video from Heaven, for “I Feel Free,” features a funeral-gown-clad Monks exhuming her bandmates corpses’ from the cold ground and attempting to resurrect them.

“There’s so much totally amazing music that’s dark and doesn’t offer any tools — maybe Joy Division is a great example — but that in itself is still a tool because it’s acknowledging that sadness in such a strong way,” Monks says. “I’m totally down with that, but for myself, a part of me just felt like if it doesn’t help anyone else, it’ll help the band — you know, my friends as people — and create a protective layer around us as we go back out on tour … This was very much for ourselves because I felt like it was possible there wouldn’t be Dilly Dally at all so I felt like if Dilly Dally was to do this again, the art kind of needed to represent this kind of safety net. Because I felt like I was going up onstage every night and I was just yelling, and I thought maybe if the music was less angry perhaps we would be able to tour longer and that Dilly Dally could last for longer.”

Dilly Dally takes the stage at the Phoenix this Wednesday, Sept. 12, for a sold-out hometown gig with Fidlar, although Monks modestly credits her American tourmates for the Toronto sellout because “I couldn’t imagine Dilly Dally fans spending that much money on a ticket that far in advance.” The band collaborated with Los Angeles producer Rob Schnapf — who has worked with the likes of Elliott Smith, Beck and the Vines in the past — to bring Heaven’s glossier more in line with the size of the rooms it can now play on tour, and Monks was proud to declare last Friday that the band is bringing its first-ever front-of-house person on tour with it to keep the mix a little more pristine.

“It was great. I’ve never heard my voice sound so good. It was cool,” she says of the previous night’s rehearsal, waving off the suggestion that Dilly Dally might go a little easier on itself in terms of roadwork during this coming album-release cycle.

“Oh, no. I think we’re really hungry to tour right now. We finally have a manager now and we have this wonderful front-of-house person who we just met yesterday but we already love her and, I don’t know, I just feel like hopefully it won’t be as much of a scrape this time financially. Before I was taking on a lot of the management duties and I think I wasn’t able to be there as a friend for my bandmates as much on the road. Now I’m hoping I can be a bit more present.”